Marina Tsvetaeva’s Slavia Cafe, Prague, CZ

I rarely do this, but I’m fudging again. I did not take these photos. My wife Oksana Mysina did while she was recently in Prague shooting scenes for a documentary film about the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.
Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) spent the better part of the years 1922-1925 in Czechoslovakia. By all accounts she loved the country and its capital Prague and she missed it greatly when she had to leave it. At the same time life here was never easy. Her family life was undergoing enormous stress and she had little, if anything, to live on. She had come to Czechoslovakia to be with her husband Sergei Efron, a former white army soldier, who, at one point she had thought killed in the Civil War, and who would attend Charles University in Prague. But they had virtually no money and lived, at best, from hand to mouth.
Tsvetaeva’s was a seeking heart and while struggling to stay alive with her husband and her daughter Ariadne, she fell into a widely publicized affair with a former military officer Konstantin Rodzevich. After this ended in 1923 she embarked on an epistolary love affair with Boris Pasternak. Although they did not actually meet until 1935 in Paris, the peak of their epistolary relationship made theirs one of the most famous love affairs joining Russian writers. For good measure, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke also briefly became a part of the relationship as they all exchanged thoughts, poetry and emotional aspirations in a lively correspondence that ended abruptly with Rilke’s death in 1926.
My friend and colleague Alexandra Smith posted what appears to be a text by Anastasia Koprshivova that describes the details of this period so well that I hereby just turn things over to it:
“In Prague itself, Tsvetaeva lived less than a year, from autumn 1923 to spring 1924. In the capital Efron settled in an attic room in the Smikhov area on Swedish (Švédská) street in house number 51, on whose wall a memorial plaque dedicated to the poetess was unveiled in 1989. Remembering this apartment, Tsvetaeva wrote: ‘In Prague I have fine, large windows revealing the whole city and the whole sky, the streets with their stairs, distances, trains and fog.’Marina Tsvetaeva daily visited places teeming with Russian emigres, whose center was the church of St. Nicholas in the Old Town Square and the Hotel Beranek (Bělehradská 110, Tylovo nám.). In the spacious hotel halls, cultural evenings were organized by the Czech-Russian Association headed by Anna Teskova, who later became Tsvetaeva’s closest and most faithful friend. In her letters to Teskova from France to Czechoslovakia, Tsvetaeva wrote in detail about her fascination with Prague. Their correspondence lasted almost ten years, from 1925 to 1939, and was permanently interrupted after the Efron family returned to the USSR.Marina Tsvetaeva loved long walks, she measured out Prague in her own steps. In letters to Teskova, she often recalls Deer Trench near Prague Castle, calling it Bear Trench in honor of the Siberian bears that lived there. She liked to wander along the paths of Petrzhin hill, which reminded her of ‘the breast of a recruit laid low by a projectile.’ For hours she would admire the city’s patches of parks, the sea from graying, time-worn roofs and observed the bends of the Vltava River with its islands.She loved the black and white cobbles of sidewalks resembling a chessboard, along which the invisible hand of fate rearranged people like pawns – ‘as someone plays at being us.’ She loved the lights after sunset, which plunged the city into an atmosphere of mysteries and riddles. She loved Charles Bridge. There, on the banks of the Vltava, a monument to Brunzvik, a knight with a golden sword and a hairstyle just like hers, was always waiting for her. In the thirties, in a letter to Anna Teskova, Tsvetaeva asked her to send photos to Paris of ‘my knight,’ the general view of the city, and ‘the sea of ​​roofs with Prague’s bridges.’The Prague period remains one of the brightest in Tsvetaeva’s work. Throughout all subsequent years the poet carefully preserved in her memory the city she loved.”

Aside from the places mentioned above, another of Tsvetaeva’s favorite haunts in Prague was the Slavia Cafe. She often had reason to be in this neighborhood because the editorial offices of the Russian emigre journal The Will of Russia were located nearby. Tsvetaeva often published her poetry in this publication that was edited by famed emigre literary figure Mark Slonim (often spelled in English as Marc). Tsvetaeva, who had no spare change to spend on the luxuries of a popular cafe, reportedly would often take just a glass of water and sit here for hours writing poetry. The building itself dates back to the 14th century. It has housed the famed Slavia Cafe since 1881. Even today one easily sees the romanticism and old-world charm of the place. One assumes that not much has changed here since Tsvetaeva was a regular. One thing that has changed is the famous painting hanging on the cafe’s back wall. Today we see a copy of Viktor Oliva’s The Absinthe Drinker, while in Tsvetaeva’s day the painting in that space was of Slavia, the mother of the Slavs. (That painting, despite the protests of Prague’s residents, was moved to Prague’s gallery of art in 1997.)
The Slavia has been a hangout for artists and artisans almost from its very beginning. It is located on the Smetana Embankment directly across from the National Theater, and right on the banks of the Vltava. Lore has it that the great Czech composer Bedrich Smetana was a regular here in the cafe’s first years, while in later decades it was also frequented by writer-turned-president Vaclav Havel, poets Jiři Kolář and Jaroslav Seifert, and Symbolist painter Jan Zrzavý. Surely Tsvetaeva was not the only Russian emigre to spend time here in the 1920s, although I have yet to find record of others.

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2 thoughts on “Marina Tsvetaeva’s Slavia Cafe, Prague, CZ”

This brings back memories! The Slavia was closed when I was first in Prague (one of my favorite cities), but it was open in January 1998, when I was there to spend time with a Russian woman I was romantically involved with — she was a huge Tsvetaeva fan, and we had hot chocolate at the Slavia. (Incidentally, I just finished reading Viktoria Schweitzer’s bio of Tsvetaeva yesterday, and I have to say I’d gotten terminally irritated with her by the end, even though Schweitzer worked hard to justify her behavior — her fate was terrible, and she was a great poet, but I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with her.)

Yes, your comments about Tsvetaeva are not the first time I have heard something like that. It’s one of the things I enjoy about encountering/writing about individuals from the past. We are given free reign to ignore personality and personality quirks. It’s a luxury we don’t have with our contemporaries, many of whom… well, we’ll let people write about 100 years from now…